“Brain Rules by [developmental molecular biologist] John J. Medina is a multimedia project explaining how the brain works. It includes a book, a feature-length documentary film, and a series of interactive tutorials.”

Non-suck Xmas gift or back to school demotivator. The book has a very polite and constructive way of saying that our society is insane and should be considered harmful.

I’m currently trying out ScribeFire. I’ve tried blogging clients such as MS’ surprisingly good Windows Live Writer before. So far I’ve kept myself to WordPress’ built in editor, which works increasingly well thanks to auto-saving and revision control, but having a text editor supporting drag and drop etc. as a browser extension seems worth trying out as a way to make publishing easier and faster.

Although all the major bits and pieces are in place, I miss a few things. So far mainly that WordPress’ own preview system isn’t employed, and that the editor doesn’t fetch WordPress’ different sized copies of images; these could be missing features in the current version, or impossible to impelement using WordPress current APIs, I don’t know. I won’t use ScribeFire (or Windows Live Writer) for posting, but these tools are probably worth a try (and they both support a wholebunch of blogging services).

12 September 2008

Due to pigfuckery performed by people representing Old Media, TPB claims to no longer respond to any press inquiries.

Anything even remotely connected to technology has never been represented correctly or fairly by journalists (whom we all know are clueless by definition), but the last straw for TPB’s staff was apparently claims made by a media outlet yesterday according to which TPB had “published pictures of dead children” (Google translation).

The pictures in question are part of autopsy reports related to a high profile murder case made public by the prosecutor and are, obviously for anyone familiar with Bittorrent, uploaded by some user of TPB. As TPB isn’t in the business of censoring the Internet, they have refused to remove anything except child porn from the service, which in this case lead to death threats being aimed towards the staff.

Stack Overflow will be a questions & answers site for programmers. A reputation/experience points and “bagdes” system comparable to those of online gaming systems are what’s supposed to drive people to the service, making the intended audience (easily distracted programmer types) forget about their jobs and ruining their lives further.

In addition to giving social advantages to people who ask good questions and give useful answers, the innovation of the system is described as a mix of features from digg/reddit voting sites, wikis and forums. Most notably, the site is entirely usable for anonymous users, keeping it easy to ask questions quickly. The reputation-tracking accounts use OpenID.

The project’s blog is now offering a beta access code, giving anyone who’s interested access to the site before its launch next Monday. Having played with the site earlier in the beta stage, I can wholeheartedly recommend anyone who might need help with coding to take a look at this.

11 September 2008

“Upload a song, experience the fever. Adds a synchronized cowbell and Walken track to any song. Part of The Echo Nest’s launch of its developer site where anyone can access our audio analysis, search capabilites or data feeds (tags / reviews / posts for any artist, all automatically.) The Python code of the cowbell renderer is also now available as an example in the open-source Echo Nest Remix API.”